Recently my team conducted some pretty fascinating research comparing the advertising impact of campaigns on Xbox LIVE to traditional video including TV. If you've been following the trade news today, you may have seen the announcement.

The study, conducted with Initiative, a division of Mediabrands, sought to address an issue that has long vexed advertisers and publishers alike: how to measure advertising impact across media types using a consistent method.

For years, advertisers have been able to measure what people say about the ads, but the survey methodology differs with different media types making comparison nearly impossible. The Web allows us to track what people do, but rarely does behavioral tracking extend to traditional media. And rarely do we get a glimpse into how consumers actually feel about an ad.

So if you're an advertiser, how do you know where you're getting the most bang for your buck? How can you tell when to dial upon one media buy because it's really working, and pull back somewhere else? And if you're running a 30-second video ad on Xbox LIVE, how do you know if it's on par-or better-than the same 30-second TV spot you purchased in primetime? Back when ad budgets were flush and brands were more concerned with omnipresence than engagement, that question mattered little. But in the new reality of lower, more accountable budgets and clear ROI expectations, this is no longer the case.

These are thorny questions, and I hear them frequently when I meet with advertisers. We realized that accurately answering these questions would require a whole "new way to roll." The good news is that we found it by collaborating with biosensory research experts EmSense and two top auto brands, Hyundai and Kia, while launching the "new way to roll" campaign for the Kia Soul.

The research process was as fascinating as the campaign results. After 25 years in this business, I've watched countless focus groups and scoured my share of survey-based research reports, and I'm here to say that the EmSense methodology is very "lean forward." Their biosensory research takes place in a lab, where an audience is exposed to a variety of media while wearing a special headset called the EmBand. This is a serious piece of headgear. It tracks brain activity, breathing rate, head motion, heart rate, blink rate, and skin temperature. In short, it measures the things marketers are dying to know the most: does my audience care - at an emotional level - about what they are seeing? What do they feel, how deeply engaged are they with the ad experience?

The researchers combined this biosensory feedback with behavioral measures and survey data.

The results of the study showed there was more time spent, greater recall, and higher levels of emotional and cognitive response in association with the interactive Xbox LIVE campaigns than with traditional 30 and 60 second spots.

This is a deep, rich and potentially groundbreaking topic which deserves the attention of anyone with a marketing budget. You can learn more about the research results and testing methodology by downloading a whitepaper here.

It's important to keep in mind this was a pilot effort, and it's just one of the ways we are working to more accurately measure the impact of advertising on our entertainment platform. But it has huge implications for marketers; for the first time we were able to measure three levels of engagement - what people said, what they did, and what they felt --in a single study. And we were able to do that in a way that allowed us to compare results across media, most importantly in contrast to traditional TV ads. By any measure, this is a big step forward for publishers and advertisers alike.